The vanlife toolkit
we actually use
No fluff. These are the apps and sites we open every week on the road — curated for European vanlifers.
Finding overnight spots
Where to park, sleep and wake up with a view.
Park4Night
The go-to app for vanlifers in Europe. Community-sourced spots with photos, reviews and real-time reports. Covers wild spots, aires, campsites and rest stops.
Visit site →Campercontact
Motorhome-specific app with a huge database of motorhome parking areas (aires/Stellplätze) across Europe. Great for finding official overnight stops.
Visit site →iOverlander
Community-contributed spots with a focus on remote and off-grid locations. Great for wilder camping and overlanding routes across Europe and beyond.
Visit site →Caramaps
Popular in France and southern Europe. Good coverage of aires and campsites in France, Spain and Italy with user photos and ratings.
Visit site →Weather
Pick your spots around the weather, not the other way round.
Windy.com
The best weather visualisation tool on the web. Animated wind maps, rain radar, temperature and wave height in one beautiful interface. Essential for coastal vanlifers.
Visit site →Meteoblue
Detailed point forecasts up to 7 days. Great for mountain and alpine routes where microclimates matter. Shows solar radiation data — useful for van solar planning.
Visit site →XCWeather
Simple, fast hourly forecasts with wind direction and strength prominently displayed. Popular with kitesurfers and sailors — which means it's perfect for coastal wild camping too.
Visit site →Ferries
Europe has beautiful ferry routes — many you can sleep in your van on deck.
Ferryscanner
Compare ferry prices across all European routes in one search. Great for finding the cheapest crossing for a vehicle — filter by "cabin" if you want to sleep on board.
Visit site →DirectFerries
Comprehensive ferry comparison for Europe. Shows routes you might not know exist — great for discovering sea connections between the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean.
Visit site →DFDS
The largest ferry operator in Northern Europe. Great routes for vanlifers: Amsterdam–Newcastle, Copenhagen–Oslo and Baltic Sea crossings with van-friendly overnight cabins.
Visit site →Community
The best tips come from other vanlifers who've been there.
r/vandwellers
The biggest English-language vanlife community on Reddit. Ask questions, share spots, get build advice and find moral support from 300k+ members living the van life.
Visit community →r/eurovanlife
Europe-specific vanlife subreddit. More relevant country rules, spots and trip reports than the global forums. Smaller community but higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Visit community →CampingCaravan.nl
Dutch-language forum with a large community of experienced European vanlifers. Excellent country-specific knowledge, especially for the Benelux and Germany.
Visit site →EV charging & energy
Plan your charge stops and never get stranded.
A Better Route Planner
The best EV route planner, hands down. Enter your van model, battery size and destination — ABRP calculates optimal charging stops with accurate range estimates.
Visit site →PlugShare
Community-driven charging spot map. Real-time check-ins, photos and comments tell you which chargers are actually working. Essential for trip planning.
Visit site →Chargemap
Popular in France and the Benelux. The Chargemap Pass lets you pay at thousands of chargers across Europe without separate accounts for each network.
Visit site →Open Charge Map
Open-source, community-maintained database of EV charging stations worldwide. Great fallback when the commercial apps miss smaller or older chargers.
Visit site →Our honest take on apps
Park4Night and ABRP are the two apps you will use every single day. Everything else is situational. Don't pay for subscriptions until you're sure you need them — most free tiers cover 90% of real use. Offline maps (OsmAnd) save your life when you're in a mountain valley with no signal.